Baby Gender Selection Programs -- Scam or Science?

When I first set up my website choose-sex-of-baby.com there were only very few other sites devoted to this topic. In fact this was one of the reasons that prompted me to set up my own site. However, during the very recent past, websites and blogs promising help with choosing the gender of your baby have mushroomed all over cyberspace, with most of them selling kits and plans for gender selection.

That brings us to the question that most of you have – are gender selection plans a scam? Is there any scientific basis for these programmes?

The only guaranteed method of gender selection now available is based on pre-implantation diagnosis. In simple terms, sperm and eggs are fertilized in a lab dish, and a few days later, tiny bits from embryos are taken and tested to know the sex of each. Next, an embryo with the preferred gender, the gender you want to have, is taken and placed in the mother’s womb to allow it to develop into a baby.

Another "medical" method although without the kind of guarantee that the first method offers, involves separating of the sperm that results in a male or a female child, and then using these sperm to fertilise the egg. Two methods are commonly used. In one method, semen in a container is made to spin at high speeds, and this is believed to aggregate the "male" and "female" sperm separately because of their different sizes. Depending on the gender of the baby you want, sperm from the top or bottom of the aggregated semen is used for fertilization. The second method tries to identify "male" and "female" sperm based on their sizes, by colouring the semen with a dye that sticks to the sperm.

In both these cases you cannot conceive naturally through sex. You may have to try more than once for a successful pregnancy. And of course, these procedures don't come cheap.

Methods based on timing of conception. The most popular of these are based on the Shettles' method. If we go by the postings on forums, we find that lot of couples have used this method successfully, while a few have not.

Gender Selection Software. We now have websites (including mine) offering to give you a prediction of the probability of your conceiving a boy or a girl, for each day of any year.

When the dates of birth of the father and the mother are entered into the software, it generates the probability of conceiving a boy or a girl for any given period. The advantage claimed for using software-generated dates is that you can avoid the bother of tracking your body temperature or secretions for one to three months.

In conclusion, I would say this: if you are dead serious about choosing the sex of your baby, have the money (around 50,000 dollars) to burn, and are also willing to put up with the inconvenience and the risk of failure a few times, you can go for the latest medical procedure.

If you are in it for the fun of trying it out, and can love a boy or girl child equally well, try methods 3 or 4.

Come to http://www.choose-sex-of-baby.com.

For more information about timing for gender selection, visit

www.choose-sex-of-baby.com

www.choosesexofyourbaby.com